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Curse of the Bambino

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The Curse of the Bambino (1920 – 2004) was an urban myth or scapegoat cited as a reason for the failure of the Boston Red Sox baseball team to win the World Series for 86 years after they sold Babe Ruth, sometimes called The Bambino, to the New York Yankees. The flip side of the curse was New York's success—after the sale, the once-lackluster Yankees became one of the most successful franchises in North American professional sports. While some fans took the superstition of the Curse seriously, many others used the expression in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

Talk about the curse effectively ended in 2004, when the Red Sox came back from an 0-3 deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series and then went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals to win the 2004 World Series.

Contents

History of the phrase

The phrase first gained wide currency in 1990, when Boston Globe writer Dan Shaughnessy used it as the title of his team history (ISBN 0140152628). This book brought it to national attention and triggered widespread usage by the national media. The phrase was also used as the title of a musical play in 2001, directed by Spiro Veloudos.

Prior to 1986, a few passing references to a Red Sox or Fenway-related curse had been floated around by sportswriters, but they tended to be vague and did not feature Babe Ruth prominently. After the Red Sox collapsed against the New York Mets in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey wrote an article connecting the errors that cost the Sox the game, the team's past history of disappointments, and the sale of Babe Ruth. After the Sox also lost Game 7, and thus the series, Vecsey wrote another article expanding on the theme, headlined "Babe Ruth's Curse Strikes Again". These articles were the first explicit mentions in print of a Babe Ruth curse.

Vecsey might have picked up the idea of the curse from other columns that had appeared in the leadup to the Series. Before that year's AL playoffs, an article by UPI sports writer Frederick Waterman said in its lead that when the Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees "he carried away with him the good luck and winning touch of the Red Sox." The rumor that Frazee had sold Ruth to finance a Broadway musical was also being discussed at the time, including in an article by Times writer Fox Butterfield a week before the Red Sox collapse.

After 1986, as the title drought stretched on, national sports media often made reference to the curse when the Red Sox were doing notably well—or notably poorly. Many serious fans grew annoyed by the constant refrain of the curse and deplored it as media-created fluff, good only for book sales, television networks, and T-shirt slogans.

The lore

Although the title drought dates back to 1918, the sale of Ruth to the Yankees was completed January 3, 1920. In standard curse lore, Red Sox owner and theatrical producer Harry Frazee used the proceeds from the sale to finance the production of a Broadway musical, usually specified as No, No, Nanette. In fact, Frazee backed many productions before and after Ruth's sale, and No, No, Nanette did not see its first performance until five years after the Ruth sale and two years after Frazee sold the Red Sox. In addition, Ruth was not the only loss to the Yankees at that time. In 1921, Red Sox manager Ed Barrow left to take over as GM of the Yankees. Other players were sold or traded as well.

Prior to Ruth leaving Boston, the Red Sox had won five of the first fifteen World Series, with Ruth as pitcher in the 1915, 1916, and 1918 teams, while the Yankees had never gone. After the sale, the Yankees came to win 26 World Series by the start of the 2004 season, while the Red Sox had been to the Series only four times - and lost each time in seven games.

The Yankees' success rate since the sale of Ruth is stunning: They have won 17 more World Series than the second-most-successful teams, the Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals, who have each won 9 championships. Ruth, by then more known for his batting than for his pitching, was a high-profile part of the 1923, 1927, 1928 and 1932 titles. Even when not winning World Series championships, the Yankees have been a model of consistency, finishing in the first division for a record 39 consecutive years—from 1926 through 1964, all inclusive—and suffering only two last-place finishes since the sale (in 1966 and 1990).

Ruth finished his career in Boston as a member of the Boston Braves, and while retired lived in the Boston area for a number of years.

“You Can’t Blame Harry Frazee!”

In 2005, ESPN Classic aired an episode in called The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame... series in which it examined the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees and gave reasons why the sale was reasonable:

Cursed results

In 1946, the Red Sox appeared in their first World Series since the sale of Babe Ruth. They were favored to beat the St. Louis Cardinals. The series went to a seventh game at Sportsman Park in St. Louis. In the bottom of the eighth inning, with the score tied at 3-3, the Cardinals had Enos Slaugther on first base and Harry Walker at the plate. On a hit and run, Walker hit a double to very short left center. Slaughter ran through the third base coach's stop sign and scored when Boston shortstop Johnny Pesky's relay throw was late. In the top of the ninth, the Red Sox put the tying run on third and the go-ahead on first with one out, but Harry Breechen shut down the next two hitters to preserve the victory.

In 1949, the Red Sox needed to win just one of the last two games of the season to win the pennant, but lost both games to the Yankees. The Red Sox were managed by Joe McCarthy, who had previously steered the Yankees to 7 World Series titles.

In 1978, the Red Sox had a 14-game lead over the Yankees on July 18, but by season's end, the teams were tied. A one-game playoff took place at Fenway Park on October 2. In the 7th inning, Boston led 2-0, but Bucky Dent, a .240 hitter with only 4 home runs all season, hit a pop-fly home run over the Green Monster with two runners on base to secure the Yankee win.

The most dramatic defeat for the Red Sox came in Game 6 of the 1986, when Boston was, literally, one strike from winning the Series. The New York Mets tied the game, then won it in the 10th on a fielding error by Bill Buckner. The Red Sox lost the 7th game, again blowing a 3-run lead. The collapses in the last two games prompted Vecsey's articles.

In 2003, the Red Sox were tied with the Yankees at three games apiece in the American League Championship Series, Boston had a 5-2 lead going into the 8th inning. Then-manager Grady Little opted to stay with a tiring Pedro Martinez rather than call to the bullpen. Two Yankee doubles and a single later, the game was tied. The series was decided in the 11th by a first-pitch, lead-off home run by light-hitting Aaron Boone. Little was out of a job less than two weeks later, though in 2006 he returned to the major-league managerial ranks as the skipper of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Attempts to break the curse

Red Sox fans have attempted various methods over the years to exorcise their famous curse. These have included placing a Boston cap atop Mt. Everest and burning a Yankees cap at base camp, hiring professional exorcists to "purify" Fenway Park, spraypainting a street sign on a Storrow Drive offramp that said "Reverse Curve" and editing it to say "Reverse the Curse" (the sign wasn't replaced until just after the 2004 World Series win), and finding a piano owned by Ruth that he had supposedly pushed into a pond near his Sudbury, Massachusetts farm. Some declared the curse broken when, on August 31, 2004 a foul ball hit by Manny Ramirez flew into Section 9, Box 95, Row AA and struck a boy's face, knocking two of his teeth out. The boy (16-year-old Lee Gavin, a Boston fan whose favorite player was and remains Ramirez) lives in the Sudbury farm owned by Ruth. That same day, the Yankees suffered their worst loss in team history, a 22-0 clobbering at home against the Cleveland Indians. Some fans also cite a comedy curse-breaking ceremony performed by country musician Jimmy Buffett and his warm-up team (one dressed as Ruth and one dressed as a witch doctor) at a Fenway concert in September 2004. However, most agree that the curse was only truly broken by the team themselves in the 2004 postseason victory.

The curse reversed?

In 2004, the Red Sox met the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. After losing the first three games, including a 19–8 drubbing at Fenway in Game 3, the Red Sox trailed 4-3 in the bottom of the 9th inning of Game 4, three outs from being swept. But the team tied the game with a walk and a stolen base, followed by an RBI single off Yankee closer Mariano Rivera, and won on a 2-run home run in the 12th inning by David Ortiz. The Sox won the next three games, becoming the first Major League Baseball team to win a seven-game postseason series after being down 3 games to none.

The Red Sox then faced the St. Louis Cardinals, the team to whom they lost the 1946 World Series and 1967 World Series, and won the series in a four-game sweep. The final game took place on October 27 during a total lunar eclipse—the only post-season or World Series game to do so.

The final out of the game was made on Cardinals shortstop Edgar Rentería—who wore Babe Ruth's old uniform number, 3 (which wasn't assigned to Ruth until he joined the Yankees, who introduced uniform numbers).

Coincidentally, the last two times that the Red Sox won the World Series, the following Stanley Cup finals were cancelled. The 1918-19 Stanley Cup playoffs were cancelled because the Spanish flu pandemic raging at the time had incapacitated members of both teams in the finals, and the 2004-05 Stanley Cup playoffs were cancelled with the entire 2004-05 season, resulting from a labor dispute between the NHL owners and the NHLPA.

Popular culture

After New York's defeat, the Curse was poked fun at during the "Weekend Update" segment of Saturday Night Live. In the sketch, the ghost of Babe Ruth (played by Horatio Sanz) appears and explains to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler that he left during Game Four with the ghosts of Mickey Mantle and Rodney Dangerfield to go drinking. Babe says that he drank a few beers, along with gasoline and horse tranquilizers, causing him to pass out for the next four days. A week later, after the Red Sox 2004 victory, there was another Weekend Update skit about an obsessed Red Sox who hazed both Tina Fey and Amy Poehler due to their superstitions. After an exchange of quarrels between them, he ended up hanging around with Johnny Damon and the rest of the Red Sox players.

See also

External links

 

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